Hello everybody, as we do not only want to release Eternal Escape on PC, but also on all main consoles, a good and intuitive gamepad control is absolutely essential. It’s very important to us, that Eternal Escape comes with a high quality on all platforms. Therefore we already started to […]

as we do not only want to release Eternal Escape on PC, but also on all main consoles, a good and intuitive gamepad control is absolutely essential. It’s very important to us, that Eternal Escape comes with a high quality on all platforms. Therefore we already started to implement gamepad controls. The upcoming Version 0.2.7 of the demo will support the Xbox One controller, other common controllers will follow soon. In addition to PS4 controllers and Switch Joy-Cons, we also plan to natively support the Steam controller.

Creating a well-functioning layout for a gamepad is more challenging compared to mouse and keyboard control because the usual controller is limited to a few buttons and joysticks. Not only all functions of the keyboard must be mapped, but also all actions that can be performed with the mouse, ideally with a few additional controller menus.

That’s why some time ago we started working on the gamepad controls to make them as intuitive and functional as possible.

Due to the many possible control actions in Eternal Escape, we have to assign some buttons multiple times. This is achieved in different ways. On the one hand, a button can trigger different actions depending on the context of the game. That can be found in many modern games today and is barely noticeable when done correctly. On the other hand, there are situations in our game that are presenting so many possibilities, therefore this is simply not viable anymore and the player needs to perform actions manually. For this, each button on the gamepad has a primary function and some of them have an alternate function. The alternative function of a button is activated while pressing another button.

In addition, we are using two radial menus to trigger important actions as quickly as possible. One of the radial menus contains various settings that can be applied on the fly, like enabling and disabling the field of view on the enemies. The other one is used for skills like attacking or taking cover. No worries, those radial menus will only be used for the gamepad controls. Furthermore, we want to give the player as much freedom as possible so the D-Pad will be pre-assigned with quick functions, which can be freely changed by the player. In later versions, the complete gamepad control will be individually adjustable in the settings.

Also, we have planned a few more features for the gamepad that won’t be available in the next update yet. For example the possibility to navigate the classic hud freely with the gamepad.

So much for the upcoming gamepad control and our progress in this area. What do you think of it? What’s your opinion of the topic gamepad navigation? Do you have ideas about what we could improve and do better? Just tell us about your experience with our game. Register on our website to share your thoughts and opinion with us on our forum. Get quick and easy news about Eternal Escape, then follow us on Twitter or check out our Subreddit.

Hey all! A few days ago we released the pre-alpha demo of Eternal Escape. Besides a short tutorial, you can play a demo level. Here you can experience the gameplay during a tactical mission. This involves things you might be familiar with like cover-system and different actions. Also, we have […]

A few days ago we released the pre-alpha demo of Eternal Escape. Besides a short tutorial, you can play a demo level. Here you can experience the gameplay during a tactical mission. This involves things you might be familiar with like cover-system and different actions. Also, we have brand new features never before seen in a turn-based tactical game, such as our plan&execute system. Both the tutorial and the mission level will be improved and expanded, bugs will be fixed and new feature introduced in upcoming demo versions.

In addition, we will establish the first steps towards transparent, community-based development. You can report bugs in the game, or discuss ideas in our forum. We are looking forward to getting your feedback.

During the demo mission, you play a predetermined squad of 5 units. You can try out the four different unit classes and a unique leader class. Each class has its own weapon, unique playstyle, and different skills at their disposal. The Assault is a heavy armored melee fighter that can knock down or charge at enemies. As a mobile and flexible marksman, the Scout has high attack accuracy as well as a few cool tricks like sprinting, blending an enemy or feign its own death. The Alchemist is a strange fellow who can attack multiple enemies at once using toxic chemicals and burning fluids and can also heal or cleanse your squad. If you want to do serious damage from far away the Hitman is your first choice though lacking both armor and mobility. The Leader can perform one additional action per turn, has superior armor and a wide variety of both combat and support skills. Because development is still work in progress characters classes and their skills are likely to change in future.

Your squad leader has to explore mysterious ancient ruins while finding his squad members. You have to destroy enemy outposts and eliminate their commanders in order to finish the mission. Your first playthrough can take about 2-3 hours. You might also need a bit time to get familiar with our plan&execute system and you will probably die a few times. But don’t be afraid! You can save your progress at any time.

In contrast to most turn-based tactics games, we have a third person view, per unit turn-order (not faction-wise), up to three actions per unit/turn, extensive game rules consisting of over a dozen attributes, damage-armor-system and several skills and effects.
Our plan&execute system separates a turn in planning and execution phase, which is unique for this genre. This changes the way how a turn-based game is played and offers several advantages. You can undo/redo our actions as you like. You can plan the route to an attack position, try to find the best spot to throw a grenade and then withdraw to a nearby cover. Each planned step can be replaced by another position or action. If you are satisfied you can (partially) execute your plan. As one of the most important features in our game, it will also be continuously improved and expanded.

We are well aware of the fact that Eternal Escape is visually not state of the art (you can read about our progress on this topic in our previous blog post). However, the demo is only meant to demonstrate the basic gameplay. Be assured that we are working hard on the visuals like characters, animations or user interface. We will keep you up to date on our progress in future blog posts.

Neither the mission level nor the current tutorial level will be included in the final game. Just look at it as a prototype that we want to share with the public. We will continue to develop the demo until early access of the actual game starts. Look forward to more content like the scenario map where you can travel to the next mission, adjust and deploy your combat squad etc. Our goal is to add, improve or perhaps change/remove features with your help so that they are perfectly balanced in the final game.

We will update you on the development and our progress on all our social media channels. To get fast, and straightforward news about Eternal Escape, you can follow us on Twitter. We are very thankful for every feedback, for this you can register on our website and share your experiences on our forum. Please help us making Eternal Escape something special and share our game on any social networks with your friends.

As always if you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact us through either social media or any other communication. Thank you very much.

Hello everybody, in our last blog post, we talked about MoCap. The topic of this blog post is actually quite similar, it just involves other senses: the hearing! Today we want to talk about the Sound Design of Eternal Escape. In a Media, Sound is just as important as the graphics […]

Hello everybody,
in our last blog post, we talked about MoCap. The topic of this blog post is actually quite similar, it just involves other senses: the hearing!

Today we want to talk about the Sound Design of Eternal Escape. In a Media, Sound is just as important as the graphics of the animations, because Sound carries and convey emotions. What would Skyrim be without its great Soundtrack “The Dragonborn comes” or the Half-Life series without its Iconic Sound Design? Super Mario wouldn’t be Super Mario without his unmistakable Voice.

Therefore we will soon start with recording sounds, like command and reaction dialogues. Those are voice samples, that character will say when they have started or executed a certain action. Furthermore, we will record weapon and ambient sounds and integrate them.
Several sounds already exist in Eternal Escape but most of them are only placeholder for future original sounds. To replace those and extend our sound diversity we will soon begin with recording sounds in the Sound Laboratory of the University of Applied Sciences Trier.

Apart from that, we want to compose our own original soundtracks to extend diversify our music library. This is why we are looking for a music composer for the future.

Hello everybody, in this blog post, we want to talk a bit about our progress and what we’ve been up to in the last few months. As the gameplay and the mechanics of Eternal Escape are now determined and working, we are now working on improving the overall look of […]

in this blog post, we want to talk a bit about our progress and what we’ve been up to in the last few months.

As the gameplay and the mechanics of Eternal Escape are now determined and working, we are now working on improving the overall look of our game. Our first step in this process is to replace the current generic with more natural and realistic animations. And this leads us to the big topic of this blog post: Motion Capturing.

Motion Capturing (or Mocap) is a commonly used process, used in the movie and games industry to apply movement of real actors and objects to virtual 3D models and display them in a given medium. One of the most known examples of a character that was created with Mocap is “Gollum” from the “Lord of the Rings” saga.

We want to use Mocap especially for all humanoid characters that will appear in Eternal Escape, to give them more personality. In order to achieve this, we started recording animation in November of 2017 in the Mocap studio of the University of applied sciences in Trier. So far we have created over 100 different animations.

On that note, we would like to mention, that it’s not self-evident for an Indie developer to be able to use Mocap, as this technology is quite costly. We are very lucky to be able to use the Mocap-Studio of the University of applied science of Trier for our work on Eternal Escape.

The recordings are still in progress and will be continued during this year. In March of 2018, we started to import the animations in Unreal Engine 4, edit and systematically replace the old dummy animations with the new ones.

A few words about the technical side of that process. We are currently using 16 cameras (soon we’ll upgrade to 32.) placed around a 25m² area (that’s about 270 square foot.). Our actor is wearing a special suit with 41 trackers attached to it. He can move freely inside this area while the trackers are registered by cameras from different angles. From this information, positional data for each point can be calculated and projected onto the 3D character model.To achieve this, we are using the Software “Motive”. The following editing of the in-game characters happens with “Autodesk MotionBuilder” and “Maya”.

Hopefully, we could give you a good insight of our work of the last months with this update.

Hello everybody, today’s status report will be about some major features and changes we added in the last couple of months due to feedback from our internal alpha testers. We will conclude this report with a short preview for the upcoming month. Stackable effects We’ve made changes about how the […]

Hello everybody,

today’s status report will be about some major features and changes we added in the last couple of months due to feedback from our internal alpha testers. We will conclude this report with a short preview for the upcoming month.

Stackable effectsWe’ve made changes about how the actions Guard and Reaction-Fire work in order to make them more flexible and versatile. Guard reduces damage while Reaction-Fire allows attacking a spotted enemy during its turn. In the past, executing one of those actions would have ended the current turn resulting in loss of unused AP (action points). So it made no difference using Guard with 3 AP or 1 AP left besides wasting precious AP. On the other hand, Guard increased defense (DEF) by a certain percentage. Therefore units with a lower defense value gained an overall smaller advantage from using Guard than heavily armored units.

Reaction-Fire was too powerful because the number of attacks possible wasn’t capped. AP cost had been increased to 2 AP in order to somewhat balance this action, resulting in decreased usage (especially for enemy AI).

Now both actions consume at least 1 AP while still ending the current turn. A consumable effect (Guarding or Auto-Fire) will be provided for the amount of AP left when activating the action.

Reaction-Fire example:If a unit has 2 AP left and activates Reaction-Fire, 2 (different) enemies can be attacked before the action wears out.

Guard example:Activating Guard with 3 AP left results in a stack of 3 Guarding effects being applied.Critical hits will be reduced to normal attacks while there is a 33% chance to evade none-critical hits. One effect will be consumed in both cases (and irrespective of success).

Right now multiple effects won’t be combined into a stack however we will implement this soon. In addition, stackable effects are required for further features like injuries, damage- or heal-over-time effects.

CoverWhile covered the chance to be hit as well as area damage will be reduced as long as the unit in a cover isn’t flanked.Until now the area providing area wasn’t clear. It was hard to say from which position an enemy could circumvent the cover. You are always covered in an angular range of 180°. A blue arrow represents the center of this range and provides some sort of orientation (also check picture). Since it’s still hard to tell where the effective cover ends we will implement a visualization of the complete cover area in the future.

A purely cosmetic improvement also applies to covers. Parts of a cover can be fired off if a target in cover has been missed.

MovementBefore recent changes, you could move freely inside movement distance radius (blue circle). Occasionally this resulted in large routes being traversed inside this area, something that felt awkward and didn’t make much sense at all.

Now, the movement is restricted by a maximum path length per movement action. The attribute MOV (movement) determines the maximum length of the route in meters. Avoiding obstacles now reduces your overall movement. Hence the attribute now gained a broader importance resulting in a greater diversion of the unit classes. Of course, you can still try different routes inside the distance radius, which right now only provides an orientation of maximum straightforward route. Manual adjustment of movement path through individual waypoints is also still possible.

Character voicesEach of the five player-controlled classes now has its own voice set. In addition humanoid and robotic enemies also have their (in comparison reduced) voice set. At the moment voices will be used only for basic situations like attacking or being hit. Acquiring and implementing this voice-package is the first step in increasing the atmosphere. In-game voices will be replaced by a customized and extensive voice package in the future.

Attack indicators

Damage from attacks is determined by a rock–paper–scissors system. Three damage types are facing three corresponding armor types. Each damage type is effective (150% damage), neutral or weak (50% damage) against a certain armor type. For example, the damage type Energy is strong against Biological armor, weak against Plating and deals normal damage against Force Field.

At the request of our testers, we have implemented an indicator for attack-actions. It shows if an attack deals extra, normal or reduced damage to the current target. In order to avoid checking action tooltips to get a clue, we added that indicator to the action bar (left) and to the target display (right). Attack indicators are represented by a “+” for strong and “-” for weak attacks just as the corresponding action-log entries.

Mission Map
The demo mission map gained some improvement. Besides visual enhancement like adding vegetation and improving some cliffs, we increased the number of covers considerably (different types of cactus, see blog main picture).
We also added two new interactive level elements, a deployable ramp and bridge. These represent unlockable shortcuts adding more diversity to the current map.

OutlookConcluding today status report we want to provide a brief summary of the upcoming months. Since the end of our internal alpha test, we are working hard on publishing the demo. This is a major goal for us because we don’t want to wait until Early Access in order to receive and include critic, ideas and suggestions from the gamers. Therefore you will be able to download and play the demo in the upcoming quarter and getting an idea of our current development progress. We would be very happy if you want to take part and joining the Eternal Escape community.

After publishing the demo one of our goals is to complete the remaining game mechanics. The tactical gameplay which is a considerably large part of the game is ~75% completed. In the curse of the year, the demo will be updated several times to reflect our current progress. Feature and enhancements suggested by the community can also be added to the demo long before Early Access begins. Though the current demo is quite advanced in terms of game mechanic, most of the assets (textures, models, animations, sounds etc) used are only placeholders. Those are borrowed from several free marketplace packages and example project and have to be replaced by our own creations step by step. Creating this huge amount of assets is also an important step we will start to accomplish this summer.

The mission map only demonstrates core game mechanics. The map won’t be present in the final game. Parts of the actual game can only be played during Early Access, so no potential spoilers until then. We are looking forward to your feedback and interest.

Good Morning, how are you? We hope you have come well into the new year. As you can see in the picture we registered Eternal Escape at the German Computer Game Award. We compete in the Young Talent Award / Prototype category and hope for a sympathetic jury XD. But […]

Good Morning,

how are you? We hope you have come well into the new year. As you can see in the picture we registered Eternal Escape at the German Computer Game Award. We compete in the Young Talent Award / Prototype category and hope for a sympathetic jury XD. But that’s not all, here is the review of December 2017.

In December, we started integrating motion capture animation into the game. After some initial difficulties, we are now on the right track. We replace and add several missing animations. This process will be with us for the next few months. In parallel, more opponents will come into play. They need animations, that have to be created by our artists manually.

The prototype is currently in a test phase, to identify and eliminate any issues with the update to Unreal Engine 4.18. When we have finished testing, the prototype will be released and you can download and play it yourself. We are looking forward to your feedback and your comments!

Hi all, it’s been quiet for quite some time around Eternal Escape, but not to worry, we have been busy behind the scenes. We and a number of people have been testing our gameplay demo prototype, which is soon to be released. Before that though we want to show you […]

Hi all,

it’s been quiet for quite some time around Eternal Escape, but not to worry, we have been busy behind the scenes. We and a number of people have been testing our gameplay demo prototype, which is soon to be released. Before that though we want to show you what exactly we’ve been doing in the last couple of months and what will happen in the near future.

Since Valve’s shutdown of Greenlight, we were in need of a new access point for you to follow our progress. For this goal, we started development on our own website. Don’t worry we will still keep our pages on IndieDB, GameJolt, and Itch.IO as well as the new project website. You will find the gameplay demo on all 4 of them soon as well.

We developed this game not just for us but primarily for you, therefore, our early start with an own website as well as social media, in hopes for feedback during the development process. Our Idea for this way of Game-Development is based on the fact that often games with a high player to developer interaction are in many cases much better than those without that bridge. Many of these games are blessed with a good modding and gaming community, which tends to be active over the borders of a game alone. This Vision of Interaction of a Game and its Community is the vision and Idea we hope to achieve with you.

Our initial Two-Man-Project “Eternal Escape” started off quite small, and was in dire need of manpower. As you might well know we studied Game-Programming in Trier, so we asked around there, if anyone is willing to join our team and since this summer we already assembled quite a team.

Tech-Wise we are proud to announce that since November we have a Motion-Capturing-Studio available to our team, giving us new possibilities for better animations. Also, we now have VR- and Console-Dev-Kits at our disposal, on which we are currently experimenting with promising results. It’s all still a long way till it will make its way into the game, but it opens the great potential for 2018 – so be ready for great news next year as well.

We will have a regular newsfeed on our newsblog as well as all social platforms, to further improve our development of the community. These posts will be released on the 15th of every month. It will be a short documentation of progress we did in the last month. Also, we will release smaller news on our social sites in form of concept arts, short videos or pictures. The first news to be released will be information above gameplay-demo very soon.

We’re looking forward to your feedbacks and helps with Eternal Escape. Thank you for supporting our joy in the best hobby – share this with friends and let’s develop a great game. We wish u a merry Xmas and a happy New Year,

Good day everyone, we are happy to release our new gameplay video. Our Team is currently working on the visualisation of our “Test-it-before-you-move”- mechanics. Tell us your thoughts and suggestions. These days we are searching for graphic designers to improve the overall look of our game. Also we implemented a […]

Good day everyone,

we are happy to release our new gameplay video. Our Team is currently working on the visualisation of our “Test-it-before-you-move”- mechanics. Tell us your thoughts and suggestions. These days we are searching for graphic designers to improve the overall look of our game. Also we implemented a lot of features, which we promised in the previous video. Check out our videos for more information.